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Securing SAP Clouds [New Paper]

Use of cloud services is common in IT. Gmail, Twitter, and Dropbox are ubiquitous; as are business applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and QuickBooks. But along with the basic service, customers are outsourcing much of application security. As more firms move critical back-office components such as SAP Hana to public platform and infrastructure services, those vendors are taking on much more security responsibility. It is far from clear how to assemble a security strategy for complex a application such as SAP Hana, or how to adapt existing security controls to an unfamiliar environment with only partial control.

We have received a growing number of questions on SAP cloud security, so we researched and wrote this paper to tackle the main questions. When we originally scoped this project we intended to focus on the top five questions we hear, but we quickly realized that would grossly underserve our audience, and we should instead help to design a more comprehensive security plan. So we took a big picture approach – examining a broad range of concerns including how cloud services differ, and then mapped existing security controls to cloud deployments. In some cases our recommendations are as simple as changing a security tool or negotiating directly with your cloud provider, while in others we must recommend an entirely new security model.

This paper clarifies the division of responsibility between you and your cloud vendor, which tools and approaches are viable for the cloud, and how to adapt your security model, with advice for putting together a complete security program for SAP cloud services. We focus on SAP’s Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) which is PaaS, but we encountered an equal number of firms deploying on IaaS so we cover that scenario as well. The approaches vary quite a bit because the tools and built-in security capabilities differ, so we compare and contrast as appropriate.

Finally, we would like to thank Onapsis for licensing this content. Community support like theirs enables us to bring independent analysis and research to you free of charge. We don’t even require registration! You can grab the research paper directly, or visit its landing page in our Research Library. Please visit Onapsis if you would like to learn how they provide security for both cloud and on-premise SAP solutions.

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Securosis is an information security research and advisory firm dedicated to transparency, objectivity, and quality. We are totally obsessed with improving the practice of information security. Our job is to save you money and help you do your job better and faster by helping you cut through the noise and providing clear, actionable, pragmatic advice on securing your organization.